Welcome to the new forum here at skepticforum.com! The Skeptic Society is really important to me, and it's the first place I ever performed "Letting Go of God." I'm going to try to be more active on this forum than on my previous forum (which was on my own website.)

Well, the movie premiered this morning on Showtime. I know because I have already received about twenty letters from people who saw it! I am so happy and relieved that this the movie is finished, the tech specifications were all met, the insurance people were all paid and clauses were added and so forth and now it really, actually, truly is out in the world. I am really hopeful that more and more people will enjoy and relate to the show - or even just listen to my side of the story.

It's funny, when I started working on this show atheism was not popular (that's how my mom would put it - "Atheism is just a fad right now!") and I didn't get the sense from my audiences that anyone knew who Richard Dawkins was. So much has changed in the last few years! It's really exciting that this world view - this particular brand of skepticism - is becoming more acceptable in the U.S. I really notice the impact of the popular success of the books by Shermer, Dennett, Dawkins and Harris. I feel lucky to be participating in this discussion about religion and able to share my story and my particular journey.

My question is: Who Are You People, Anyway? On my last forum, people wrote in and explained briefly their story. I was thinking that this thread could possibly work like that too. I love reading about how people have come from to get to their particular world view. Many people came from much more conservative and fundamentalist backgrounds than I did. I think they are truly heroic for taking the risk of questioning the truths that serve to adhere them to their community. I also think it's remarkable for people to come to question religious dogma and the concept of God even if they were raised with no religion. I will check in from time to time to read your responses.

I want to thank Michael Shermer and the Skeptic Society for just... well, existing! I love the Skeptic Society and feel sad that now, since I live in Illinois, I cannot attend the lectures anymore. What a wonderful environment you have created for people to question and find others who are also questioning.

Hi, I'm Gord, a Canadian. I was born to a large family that regularly went to church, but never really discussed religion at home. My father liked to say grace before large meals, that was about the extent of it.

We were, um ... I can never remember the name of it. They don't allow blood transfusions. Those guys. Anyway, when I was 2, I had to have a blood transfusion to save my life, so my family was kicked out of the church. Not a big deal to them at the time, apparently. It was basically just, "You did what? But then you can't be one of us!" and "Okay, we'll leave then." Guess my family was more of a hanger-on group than an actual bunch of nitty-gritty believers.

After that we would go to a different church every Sunday. Ukranian Orthodox, I think it was. (Still is, come to think of it. I pass by the church every few weeks. Somehow I can never see the letters as meaning anything, though.) (Yes, they're in English! The words just don't seem to convey any meaning to me.) I never knew what was going on. It seemed boring, frightening, and a little baffling -- like we weren't allowed to know what was going on. In Sunday school, asking questions was frowned upon, because every question seemed to be a bad question. You couldn't ask "why?" or "how?" Other that those two, I really didn't see any questions worth asking, really. When, who, what, and where are pretty meaningless when you can't find out why or how.

One Sunday morning, when we were getting ready for church, I said to my father, "I don't want to go to church anymore." He asked if anyone else felt that way. Turned out, we all did. So we never went to church again.

I didn't believe in God when I was a kid going to church. It was just a thing I was told, not something to be either believed or disbelieved really. The stories never made sense to me. I couldn't figure out what God was supposed to be, or why Jesus believed in God, or why Jesus did anything come to think of it. When I reached high school, I tried a Mennonite church for a while ('cause the girls were really cute!!), but that didn't work either. I have vague recollections of gritting my teeth and trying very very hard to "let Jesus into [my] heart." It felt about the same way as when I try to levitate a glass off a table -- I can't do it, I don't know how, and if I really have to think about it, I don't believe it's even possible. Other people told me they had "let Jesus into [their] heart[s]" but nobody could explain how they did it, what they actually did, how they knew they'd done it, or what I should do to make it happen for me. I even tried thinking for a while that Jesus had simply refused to enter into my heart. It's not really the sort of thing you can discuss with Mennonites, though -- they look at you sideways after that. (They made me sit in their children's class that day. There were at least 20 children in it. I was older than the others by at least ten years. I wouldn't say it was "awkward," merely inconvenient -- they didn't serve coffee.)

So I gave up trying, and have been much happier for it ever since. I still dream about the Mennonite girls on occasion, though. They had the biggest, bluest eyes. *sigh!*

Gord wrote:. . . In Sunday school, asking questions was frowned upon, because every question seemed to be a bad question. You couldn't ask "why?" or "how?"

That was my experience as a kid too. I never did like the answers they gave. And then one day I asked why we couldn't use red or black crayons in the playroom. They said those are bad colors. Sheesh. Even as a kid I knew why that was lame. I asked my mom if I could stay home after that. And that started me on the road to becoming a non-believer.

Hello, I am Matthew from Australia. As my parents are atheist, I have always been an atheist. My interest in religion was tied up to my interest in anthropology and love of classical history and pre-history.

Like you, I am an ex-accountant. I had the good luck to work for the Australian producers of the show Mythbusters when they were making their first science TV show "Beyond 2000" however I mostly worked on the more mundane documentary shows because they were tax funded and that's what accountants get to work on. As the exec-producers of Beyond 2000 were all ex-accountants this trained my skeptical skills when dealing with directors, writers & crew. You want to shoot what, where, for how much?

I came to this forum from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible Forum after reading an article by Mr Shermer in Scientific American.

JuliaSweeney wrote:It's funny, when I started working on this show atheism was not popular (that's how my mom would put it - "Atheism is just a fad right now!") and I didn't get the sense from my audiences that anyone knew who Richard Dawkins was. So much has changed in the last few years! It's really exciting that this world view - this particular brand of skepticism - is becoming more acceptable in the U.S.

Agreed, it does seem to be slightly easier to dicuss the topic. Although, economicly and socially, I still feel like I'm at risk if it was known that I wasn't "part of the fold."Even while at the "dub" (remember Frosh pond?) I pretty much kept my trap shut. It was forced on me as a child and trying to reject it was quickly met with threats and 'discipline' so I suppose I simply flew under the radar from then on.

Last edited by HghrSymmetry on Thu Dec 03, 2009 3:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Welcome Julia.For the most part Iʻm an American, but according to my dad I was found behind the Canadian army when I was born in Holland.This canʻt be true because I was born in ʻ42 and the Canadians didnʻt liberate Holland till ʻ45. Maybe this was my dadʻs way of saying thank you or maybe it was a lie because of his Catholic upbringing.Anyway, my mom never lied because she was an atheist.She forbid any talk about religion in the house and I still have my foreskin.

My neighbor on the right was a Jewish family who collaborated with the Nazis and escaped their wrath. Their kids were not allowed to play with me because I was a heathen. My neighbor on the left was an undertaker who gave me the creeps when heʻd say: "Iʻll see you later". His kids were not allowed to play with me either because I was not dead yet.

My neighbor behind me was god who lived in a church. I know this because he woke me up every Sunday morning with his loud bells and I would see him in his long black robe with a bottle of holy water when his drunken ass came from the undertaker.

My neighbor across the street was from Aruba. His girls were not allowed to play with me because I was a boy. But he was allowed to play "black Peter" and help St. Nick to send boys like me to Spain if I hadnʻt been good. Life just wasnʻt fair back then.

So, I grew up a lonely atheist among the 37 or so different religions, whose kids all seemed so happy to go to heaven. I swear, before I die Iʻll get my dick cut and have someone read me a bible.

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"When you put a toucan on a monkey’s ass, don’t be fooled by the brightly colored plumage, beware of the enormous bill!"

Hi, Julia. I look forward to seeing your movie. I really love the monologue. I first heard it on This American Life.

I live in Colorado, in a largely Buddhist community in the middle of ranch land, at the base of three 14000 foot peaks. My wife, her son, and I live in a house I built, on land my in-laws bought in the early 70s.

I was raised an Army brat, by ignorant rednecks that called themselves my parents. My father was a mean, drunken, Irish, atheist. My mom was a weak, drunken, Lutheran. My brother and I were sent to a Southern Baptist church on Sundays so my parents didn't have to deal with us for half the day. I stood in the corner, quite a bit, during Sunday school for questioning God's word, or the teacher.

I spent a long time trying to find spiritual answers. If I had moved to the community I live in now, back then, I would probably have thought to have found them. I seem to learn best from negative example. I was an Infantry soldier, it made me think war is bad. I had ignorant parents, it made me auto-didactic. I moved to a spiritual hub, it made me a skeptic.

My wife and her family have shown me what love, dedication, and family mean. Which is a positive example that I have learned from. My wife says that I have beat the odds to become the man I am today. I held a lot of resentment for a long time. Being an atheist has let me understand that there are no do-overs, so no reason to resent or regret. It's also given me reason to live happily, as it's the only chance we get to.

Thanks, Julia. Welcome aboard, and I look forward to reading more from you.

I was raised an Army brat, by ignorant rednecks that called themselves my parents. My father was a mean, drunken, Irish, atheist. My mom was a weak, drunken, Lutheran. My brother and I were sent to a Southern Baptist church on Sundays so my parents didn't have to deal with us for half the day. I stood in the corner, quite a bit, during Sunday school for questioning God's word, or the teacher.

.I feel sad for you but how can you call them like this,they gave you life and birth.Or were they just pay-rents,payed your rents.

Hi Julia and welcome. I'm a retired state employee in Montana, used to be Presbyterian ( by birth), athiest for about 10 years and now lutheran though I have days when the athiesm runs strong again. I'm sort of there now as I'm back from a trip to visit the wife's family in West Dakota. They show toxic levels of religosity and I'm too polite to share how I feel about it all.

I was raised an Army brat, by ignorant rednecks that called themselves my parents. My father was a mean, drunken, Irish, atheist. My mom was a weak, drunken, Lutheran. My brother and I were sent to a Southern Baptist church on Sundays so my parents didn't have to deal with us for half the day. I stood in the corner, quite a bit, during Sunday school for questioning God's word, or the teacher.

.I feel sad for you but how can you call them like this,they gave you life and birth.Or were they just pay-rents,payed your rents.

I'm not trying to make anyone sad, here, especially not for me. I'm making a claim of the difficulty, and the inspiration that I had to get to where I am. I didn't say anything about my parents that wasn't true. As for giving me life, I didn't ask for it, and they really didn't put forth an effort into making it a fruitful life, and they have never payed my rent. In fact, I was homeless a few times, after leaving the Army. I worked very hard to be where I am, which is comfortable. Now my mom wants to know me better, now, as it seems I have something to offer. My wife's family is far more important to me than my own, because they think I'm worth knowing, for me, not for what I have earned.

I'm Jeff D, one of the regulars from both of the incarnations of your forum on your old website. I see that izitrue has also re-registered here.

Looks like I'll have to set up my avatar image again and my profile, but registration was very easy.

Starting mainly after the crash of the first forum, I've saved a lot of my old longer posts from the past years (and a few posts by some others, including Norma, Brad, Captain Black, and Herk) into Word documents over the past few years. Call me egotistical, or call me a recycler.

Way to go Julia, get people thinking! When I went down this path before, I still found God. I followed you on the show, very impressive. I still found God, but not just God, but aliens, a real Godzilla, Godfather's Pizza, God Bless America. What? No point? Yes, and here we go- I hope you do read this one.

Okay, Einstein said that there has to be an infinite amount of permutations within an ion of light. IFINITE. That means that everything should exist. Well, maybe that's not where I found God, but it's a start.

Einstein (he's kind'a like you), said the whole relativity thing. You know, looking at the hand of a clock, then moving away from it at the speed of light would prevent the light from changing to the next frame of time, so you still see the same moment on the clock like looking at one frame from a film forever.

Michio Kaku, the science channel guy (you must know him), frequently talks about alternate universes (universi), and scientifically proves infinite (INFINITE) amounts of universi, and Elvis may exist there. Nope, not where I found God yet.

I am not submitting a script, almost there.

Computers (in theory) will lead us to some artificial conciousness WAY down the road (Skynet!). People will eventually be able to interface with the machine, blurring the line between our minds and machines. Eventually we'll have a path to immortality (WAY eventually). Whether it's biological, or a machine what we will live our immortality as, won't matter so much.

Okay, back to Einstein real quick. Einstein (He's like you!) said that energy cannot (CANNOT) cease to exist. It expands like ripples in a pond. So, ponds' ripples don't just stay in the pond, they hit the shore, move a grain of sand or two, then some mud, then - imperceptably continue on forever, and ever amen.

The energy in our minds is us (Isn't that what you believe?). Just patterns, but they make up a web-like mess, not (in theory) as a movie playing in our minds in 3D. These patterns aren none-the-less, permanent in some form.

Einstein (I like him) says because the universe is curved, time loops around. I find that harder to believe than God. I find Einstein easier to believe than most bibles, but choked on that a bit. Okay, so in theory, this happens again (all of it?).

Back to us (not you and I, but conciousness, our energy patterns, and all). We may just continue to exist into the hyper-far future up to the point where we could travel through time (like we are now), but back and forth. Maybe, just maybe, we'll be immortal, go back in time, pick up everyone, bring them forward to immortality (wouldn't you do it if you could? Well, maybe not everyone - we might judge who comes back - all at the same time?). What would we be then? Being that we are all mixed up into our biological/computer AI conciousnesses, bringing back all of humanity (the one's we like?), animals, whatever, pizza, ice cream, then existing in a true utopia for how long? Until we get bored, then just blow it up to start all over just to be interested in the great stories again, as if we'd never heard them. Julia, you will be God, and watch over us when it happens again. There. Is this a possble secret of the universe....stay tuned!

I was never a religious believer. By the time I was old enough to think clearly at all,I decided that I didn’t believe and had never believed in what I had heard in Sunday school and church services. So I’ve called myself an atheist and a secular humanist since I was 12 or 13. On Dawkins's 7-point scale, I'd say I am about a 6.9 regarding the likelihood that the prototypical, intervening / caring deity of theism actually exists.

My parents exposed me to middle-of-the-road Protestant Christianity, right up through confirmation classes with the Disciples of Christ. But starting when I was a very small child in the late 1950s, my parents also gave me free access to encyclopedias, the National Geographic, the Time-Life Science Library, the Time-Life Nature Library books, and trips to an excellent natural history museum. I developed and kept an early and intense interest in history, mythology, anthropology, paleontology (dinosaurs! hominid ancestors!), astronomy, etc. There was really no way that early Iron-Age fairy tales could compete with the rich detail of the real past and the real present.

I never suffered any trauma or mistreatment, etc. at the hands of religious people (lay or clergy), and therefore I had and have no reason to be “angry” or “resentful” toward religion or toward imaginary supernatural beings.

I don’t read Hebrew, Latin or Greek, but within the limitations of English, I have been studying comparative religion and religious history – especially textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament for about 30 years. I’ve always found religious history (and lately, neuroscientific and social/psychological study of religion) to be a fascinating subject. But after 9-11, I began to take religion in general more seriously as a potentially dangerous phenomenon, and I have become more outspoken as a skeptic and an atheist.

I watch God Said Ha often and am always transfixed. I recall my 2005 battle with (stage IV) lymphoma and, well, the tears always flow. Thank you for yet another rivoting and excellent show. I will strive to see you in person one day.

Love your dog, shown with Mulan at the end of the show. During the rehabilitation phase after all of the "mess" of cancer, I could not walk. My first dog, at age 46, has helped me get back on my feet in many ways.

Here in the Pacific Northwest we are seeing quite a few of the ONLY GOD bumper stickers. I have a dot net web site (OnlyDog) devoted to my dog's influence on my new life. The sticker I designed celebrates both my love for dogs and an alternative to this "in your face" sticker becoming very prevalent.

God was created to explain the seemingly unexplainable - HOW WAS THE UNIVERSE CREATED?

It is, indeed, unfortunate that scholars sought to answer this question before they asked the precursory question - WAS THE UNIVERSE CREATED?

The answer to the second question is NO. And the proof is ridiculously obvious:Axiom: Something must exist before it can act or be acted upon, change or be changedImplication: The phenomenon of change (cause and effect aka creation) is derived from the phenomenon of existenceAxiom: No phenomenon can be derived from its own subordinate derivativeConclusion: Existence is not the result of cause and effect

If you didn't just slap yourself on the forehead in a flash of epiphany, then your epiphone is obviously out of order and you need to call for repair.

The phenomenon of existence is not inexplicable, but the explanation is based on a principle, not a process. It is a prevailing dynamic, a fundamental law that governs the basic nature of the cosmos. It rules over the process of change. It is found at the heart and soul of every equation. It is a familiar axiom, universally known and accepted. Its influence is ubiquitous, yet since the advent of scientific inquiry, its real significance has been overlooked and undiscovered. Ironically, the answer to the enigma of existence lies hidden in plain sight.

If anyone is interested, I'll explain it.

THoROccupation: CurmudgeonAge: Eternal (60 years wearing my current corporal garb)Sex: Not as often as I'd like but probably more often than I shouldMarital Status: Madly in love with the same gal I've loved for 25 yearsHobbies: Pondering my navel, watching grass grow, training unicorns, chasing bosonsEducation: Omniscient and still learningLocation: Just south of deep South Texas (the southern part)Politics: Don't Tread On Me

Last edited by libshoppe on Sat Dec 05, 2009 10:59 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Well, based on your riddle, it wouldnʻt be a scientific theorem and I assume it wouldnʻt govern oneʻs personal behavior, although Iʻm certainly a principled man.

One of my principles is that I take no nonsense from a curmudgeon, but hey, maybe youʻre in a good mood. Based on your logical explanation I hold out hope that it is not a rouse to serve as the foundation for a system of religious belief or behavior, so, yes.Explain it please.

"When you put a toucan on a monkey’s ass, don’t be fooled by the brightly colored plumage, beware of the enormous bill!"

vanderpoel wrote:Well, based on your riddle, it wouldnʻt be a scientific theorem and I assume it wouldnʻt govern oneʻs personal behavior, although Iʻm certainly a principled man.

One of my principles is that I take no nonsense from a curmudgeon, but hey, maybe youʻre in a good mood. Based on your logical explanation I hold out hope that it is not a rouse to serve as the foundation for a system of religious belief or behavior, so, yes.Explain it please.

From your curmudgeon reference, should I assume you're talking to me? [De Niro Accent] Are you talking to me? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Ok.[/De Niro Accent] ... Well, first, did you appropriately slap your forehead?

Basically, there's a reason that the language of science - mathematics - encodes its logic into a device called an equation which requires its elements to be equivalent on opposite sides of the argument. It is quantitative logic in its simplest, most pristine form.

There is also a reason why every action precipitates an equal and opposite reaction.

These are reflections of an even more basic principle that governs the nature of the cosmos.

OK, I found the original, from 2008, the second time I joined after the crash - I wrote nearly the same as above and added:

"I'm an unapologetic, in-your-face hard atheist who lives in the wilds of a Southeast Idaho city, USA. I read too many books, watch too much teevee, surf too many forums, and here I am! So, is the gang all here? (I'm just beginning to catch up . . .)"

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard P. Feynman

Iʻve got the X=0 part and since it is said that nothing exists except atoms and space, everything else is opinion and everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity, we know the universe is the answer, but if X is the universe, is 0 the question? I am adrift.

on edit: this post is in response to libshoppe, donʻt mean to derail the OP

"When you put a toucan on a monkey’s ass, don’t be fooled by the brightly colored plumage, beware of the enormous bill!"